Expert’s Choice
Kevin Asplin is a professional military genealogist and military author
The Ogilby Trust supports and promotes the regimental and corps museums of the British Army. The parent website ( armymuseums.org.uk) has been a regular bookmark for military historians for years – the place to find out what museums are where, and so a useful directory for when you’re ready for a deep dive into a regiment’s history. The Ogilby Muster ( theogilbymuster.com) is a relatively new sister site, launched late last year. This centralised hub enables you to search digitised material from across members’ collections. Of course, regimental museums vary a great deal in terms of the amounts of archival material they preserve. And over the years many have made finding aids, transcriptions, indexes, images and other digitised content available. The Ogilby Muster, for the first time, offers a ‘one-stop shop’ where you can search for references in catalogued documents, private papers and diaries, photos and maps, regimental histories and more.
You can search by name or keyword, then filter results by date range, ‘Era’ (eg ‘World War One, Gallipoli’ or ‘World War One, Home Front’), or narrow your research to a single regimental collection, and if you create a free account and log in you will see full details of the record. There are already more than 75 participating collections, and more are joining during the year. For example HorsePower in Winchester, the museum of the King’s Royal Hussars, joined at launch – this selection alone comprises about 12,000 images from the First World War.